On Tuesday, February 10, John McLeary of Vassar College delivered a lunch lecture based on his recent readings of Poincaré in the original French. The abstract for his talk follows:
One of the most beautiful results in topology is the Poincaré index theorem, which he proved in a series of papers that were published in the 1880's, before he introduced 'Analysis situs,' his famous series of papers that established algebraic topology as a subject. So what was he doing and what did he do?
McLeary was familiar to several of the students as the author of the textbook last semester's Topolgy class used. After the talk, the Math 300 class asked him questions about graduate school and life as a mathematician. We were interested to discover that he started out in college as a theater major because he knew he wanted to do something creative, but later came to see he could be just as creative while doing math. He also advised us that the most important thing to consider when picking a graduate school is that you are joining a mathematical community, and you want to make sure it's a community that encourages collaboration.